Good morning, and welcome to Friday, August 11. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Comings and Goings. Get in touch: rick.seltzer@chronicle.com.
Behind California’s new dual-enrollment push
Sonya Christian, who started in June as chancellor of the 116-institution California Community Colleges system, would like all ninth graders to take college courses. It will improve equity and encourage college attendance, she told the Daily Briefing this week. Our conversation, which follows, has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Can you tell us about this vision?
We are looking at dual enrollment as one of the mechanisms to transform access to higher ed. We made a serious dent in getting more high-school students to engage in college courses with legislation here in California.
When you look at the percentage of students taking advantage of this legislation, and you look at the senior year in high school, it’s 14 percent. And when you get down to ninth grade in high school, it’s 6 percent. When we disaggregated the data, it was almost continuing systems of privilege. Students who had the higher propensity of doing AP classes were the ones coming to dual enrollment.
Do you have specific goals for students?
Imagine if all of them, their default ninth-grade schedule, had at least one college credit, so they’re introduced to college. They start thinking about ‘What does college look like?’ and start working with their guidance counselors. They start looking at, at least doing 12 college credits by the end of the 12th grade. So that is the goal: Every California high-school student will complete 12 college credits as a default.
The idea of default is also an important idea. If we do it by invitation, what we have noticed is that those who know about it know to say yes to the invitation. If it is a default schedule, and then you have to opt out, then our ability to address equity and enrollment for our low-income students and students of color, it makes us much more successful.
The number of students attending community colleges cratered during the pandemic, but dual enrollment is up. Can this effort also bolster enrollment?
The California Community Colleges have lost about 300,000 students. We went from 2.1 million to 1.8 million. Dual enrollment will increase enrollment.
Is it good for student success and equity? Yes, the data shows it. Would it increase the enrollment of the community colleges? Is it a smart business move? Yes.
What obstacles will you have to navigate?
The high-school and college structures are extremely different. Our high-school teachers have different levels of qualifications. So there is a conversation: Are they minimally qualified? What does the articulation look like?
Does that mean ninth graders would be taught by high-school teachers and not community-college faculty members?
We have three different ways of doing what we’re calling early college. One is a class taught at a high school by a high-school teacher, and students get both the high-school requirement met and the college requirement met. Another option is where college faculty go to the high school, or they also teach online. And then the third model is where high-school students come to the college class. We are trying to integrate all of them.
Are all high-school students really ready for college-level work?
I believe that our high-school students have a lot of potential.
For the most part, the course that they would take in ninth grade would be an intro-to-college student-development class, typically put on by our counselors, who are trained in understanding human development.
In addition, some faculty feel a kind-of-fun class — a gen-ed requirement, either music or those kinds of electives in the ninth or 10th grade — is a good way to get them to have a good experience.
